How I Stopped Comparing My Inside to Their Outside
Zoe laughs like sunshine. That is the problem.
She laughs in the hallway, in the cafeteria, in group chats where I only send a heart. She walks into a room as if the room had been waiting for her. And me? I walk into a room and spend the first ten minutes checking which of my hands is more awkward.
One evening I sat on my bed with my phone face down on the pillow, because I had just scrolled through another round of happy pictures. A half-eaten sandwich sat on a plate beside me. My laundry was folded, but only because I had been avoiding something bigger.
In my head, a little cloud floated up. It showed Zoe in a sunny meadow, laughing, with no worries at all. Another cloud showed a perfect cup of tea that nobody had ever spilled.
I thought: Her inside must look like that. Mine looks like this.
That was the whole problem, and I did not see it yet. I was comparing the way I felt on the inside with the way Zoe looked on the outside.
· · ·
The tangled cables
The next afternoon, Zoe invited me to her room to “help with a project.” She wanted to take a photo for the school art board, and she needed someone to hold the tripod steady.
Her room was not the meadow from my cloud. Cables tangled across her desk like spaghetti. Sticky notes fell off the wall. Crumpled photo paper lay all over the floor, and one cushion had a mysterious jam stain.
“I took forty-one photos,” Zoe said cheerfully. “Forty were terrible. One was good enough.”
I picked up one of the rejected photos. It showed Zoe with her eyes closed and her mouth full of cookie. I started laughing, and then she started laughing, and soon we were both on the bed holding our stomachs.
“I get nervous every time I walk into a room,” she said, wiping a tear. “I just walk in anyway. Nobody can see the inside part.”
I stared at her. “You’re nervous?”
“Lina. I rehearsed hello in the mirror this morning.”
And that was the moment the meadow in my head folded up like a paper map. Zoe’s outside was real, and so was her inside, which was messy like mine. I just was not allowed to see it unless she showed me.
· · ·
Inside with inside
Zoe gave me a new rule that afternoon, written on a sticky note in her round handwriting: Inside with inside. Outside with outside.
“If you want to compare,” she said, “compare fair. Your inside to her inside. Or your outside to her outside. Never your inside to her outside. That’s not a comparison. That’s a trick.”
That night, at the kitchen table, I opened a notebook and wrote my own inside page. I wrote that I was nervous in rooms, that I rehearsed hello too, that I sometimes ate a sandwich standing up because I was too tired to sit. I wrote a little, then I wrote a lot, in swirly handwriting that did not even try to be neat.
When I finished, I read it once. It did not look weak. It looked human.
I still scroll sometimes, and the old trick still tries to work. But now I stop and ask: whose inside am I looking at? The answer is always the same. I am not seeing anyone’s inside, and that includes the inside of the girl who laughs like sunshine.
Zoe still walks into rooms as if they had been waiting for her. I know now that her hello was rehearsed, and that makes me like her even more. When I catch myself measuring again, I take a breath and add one more line to my inside page. It is a very small habit, and it is turning out to be one of my favorite ones.
With love,
Lina
